I'm looking at purchasing a couple of domains for new projects i want to launch, they are between 5 and 8 years old and are currently indexed in Google and Yahoo. Doing a check on archive.org to check the indexing history i see that in 2006 neither of the domains had any pages indexed in Google, although the whois didn't change, Ive read somewhere that if domains have no pages in Google for say a year then Google will reset the domain indexing age so rather than being 8 years old the domain would just be 1 and a bit years old. It had pages indexed in 2007 and does now. Anyone think this sounds about right? I would like to get the domians as the name sounds nice but im more purchasing for the age than the name itself. If they did turn out to have an aging of only a year i would look at other domains. thanks, Carl
If I buy a shop with a name that is 7 years old but never sold anything for the last four years. Yes, it is four years old.
The domain age isn't whats of value, it's the age of the actual web page(s). Lets say for example you buy a 10 year old domain but completely change the site, new content, new design, new URLs, the whole works. Regardless of the age of the domain the web pages themselves are new, in effect making the domain age pretty much useless.
Check these articles out at http://www.dewittsmedia.com/seo-blogs/category/domains/ Actually one of them I wrote up right after a consulting session for a client they might help.